


Such stuff as dreams are made on

by chaos_harmony



Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-19
Updated: 2010-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-13 18:41:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/140461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaos_harmony/pseuds/chaos_harmony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kate watches Will watching her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Such stuff as dreams are made on

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Beth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beth/gifts).



In the spaces between a quip without edge and the punctuation of a gunshot, you’ll feel his gaze on you sometimes, feel more than see, and know it to be there all the same.  During a job, always during a job, eyes marking out a space between your shoulderblades, memorizing you.  Watching, always watching, and it’s in your nature, you know, to say something sour-natured with a curl of your lips, half flirtatious challenge etched into the line of your brow.  And yet there’s something else, some quintessential power of who you are and who he is and who you are together that steals the words from the back of your mouth.

 

Oh, _Will_.

 

You are a hard woman.  The world tells you this much, because the world has made you so, but you are a woman still, curves that draw the male gaze to all the right places, long thick lashes and full lips and awareness of how the right swing of a hip cries out _female_ just so.

 

You dream, too.  Funny, to think that a woman like you, who has built her life on wits and survival and being tougher and smarter and warier than anyone ever expects women to be.  Tougher and smarter and warier than most people expect anyone to be, male or female.  But you are human, a human woman, and sometimes when your eyes drift shut, you too see other worlds.

 

You dream a child for yourself once.  He’s lighter skinned than you, with familiar eyes (watching, always watching), but your child still, and this you know in your dreamer’s heart.  Your son, his father’s eyes set into his child’s face, old eyes in a young face lingering in that space between your shoulderblades like something between burden and deliverance. 

 

The candy glass world of your dreamscape crumbles around you, and you hold your child close as night converges on you both.  When you wake up, it’s with a cry that almost turns into a half murmer of the word “Zimmerman” before you clamp your lips shut.

 

You gnaw on your fist for a while, remembering familiar eyes, and a child’s voice that sings you back to sleep.

 

Kate, old girl, you’re going soft.

 

In other dreams, the simpler ones, there’s no child, but Will is there, Will Zimmerman with his sandy hair and unassuming smile, looking charming and awkward and so very dear.  You dream him naked, flush against you, his hair tickling the crook of your neck and his lips dropping to one of your breasts as your legs lock around his.  Then he’s inside you, and you can feel rug burn on your back while both your hands claw identical marks down the smooth, pale skin of Will’s shoulders.

 

Whenever you wake from those, you stand under a cruelly cold shower for as long minutes tick by, and you close your eyes and your wet hair clings slick along your face like rain, and all you want is _heat_. 

 

Will is naïve, and it makes him stupid, should make him stupid, to look upon this wide world with eyes so kind, to look on you with eyes that gentle, and sometimes you almost want to claw them out for being so bloody understanding.  For knowing so much, in spite of his kindness, or perhaps because of it.

 

Stupid, you think.  Kind, and stupid.

 

(But he’s one of the most brilliant people you’ve ever met.)

 

Magnus, teasingly, called him her ingenue once, and you tasted the word in your mouth, testing it out with the tip of your own tongue.  Ingenue.  Innocence, purity, something gentle, too gentle for this world, for their world.

 

Will’s no delicate flower, though, but you still think it at him sometimes, half teasingly.  Ingenue.  You don’t bother thinking about what that makes you.  You tell yourself that you do not think of what the word is for the two of you together, a man with a woman’s gentle touch and kind eyes, a woman with a ready smirk and readier fists, Kate Freelander and Will Zimmerman, Will Zimmerman and Kate Freelander, something dark and pale and miraculously short of becoming an outright contradiction.

 

You almost kissed him, once.  It was after he’d died, died and come back.  When his heart stopped, wouldn’t start again, you could swear yours stopped right along with it, except that’s not possible because you lived, lived and fought and shouted for him to live too.

 

And he did.

 

He did, and when he came back (came back to you), you could have kissed him right there on the fucking mouth, stupid Will and his stupid heroics and stupid ingenue’s eyes.  You almost pressed your fingertips to the edges of his face (and it would have been rough with stubble; he is a man, after all), almost leaned forward and took his bottom lip between your teeth, almost bit till he bled just to show him how alive he was after all, almost curled your hands into his hair while your tongue brushed his.

 

Almost.  Almost, almost, almost, like a mantra.

 

And one day, perhaps you will.  Take his hands and kiss his lips and look into those eyes, those eyes that follow you from dawn to dusk in the world of your mind, and tell him what a fucking annoying idiot he is. 

 

(But not yet.  Not yet, not yet.)

 

And perhaps this is love: you watching him watching you, the dreams of tangled bodies and tangled sheets as your press him back into the pillows, the elegant arch of his throat as he cries out for want of you while you mark him, make him yours, yours, yours.

 

Or perhaps this is love: that you yelled and begged and fucking fought him back into life, could have killed him a second time if he’d refused the call, and drifted gently, sweetly into the dark, where you could not follow.

 

Or perhaps this is love: that he came back at all.

 

Or perhaps this is love: that odd and easy partnership (friendship) that exists between you, comrades in arms in all the strangeness of this abnormal (hah) world, the laughter and the trust, most miraculous of all for someone like you, that trust.

 

Or perhaps this is love:  A child with his father’s eyes, eyes you know too well, a child that is your flesh and blood and a promise (a warning, too) of the future that could be.

 

(The next time they go out into the field together, perhaps you'll say something about those eyes of his.)


End file.
